interviews (coming soon)
I painted a person, yes they’re Black…and?
I’m thinking about the historical relationship between painting and printmaking, there’s an ostensible contrast between the two processes. Where printmaking implies the multiple and dissemination; painting at once speaks to the singular. Now whilst paintings can be made as part of a series, an identical series at that, the distinction I would argue lies in the matrix. Where a printmaking matrix embeds information in an image, information in a painting is embedded in gesture, brushstroke and or line (the formal analyses of what constitutes painting).
Herein lies my point of concern. What does it mean when painting and printmaking together converge into a singular plane? Both painting and printmaking indeed possess their own distinct histories which I intend to problematise through their forced convergence which has become my formal and practical concern. Insofar as this; the image remains highly charged. For these oppositions, manipulations and gestural marks made — be they through printmaking or painting, point outwardly. They point towards the performative, to sites of resistance and of redress. This is to say, embodied experiences lay at the root of both painting and printmaking. Thus, a repertoire of images arises as both the signified — the plane of context, and the signifier — the plane of expression. They then can become mediated through painting and printmaking, and are signs unto themselves and the audience.
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What, then, is at stake through the dyadic composition of painting and printmaking as signs? Through problematising the historical weight of each respective medium, I am called to consider bell hooks and her seminal 1995 essay An Aesthetics of Blackness — Strange and Oppositional. She argues that Black Aesthetics is deeply rooted in everyday life; developed in opposition to dominant cultural norms and a communal sense of identity. Through challenging Western aesthetic thought, Black Aesthetics contrastingly explores the influence (knowingly or unknowingly) of Black vernacular traditions which come forth through fashion, music, dance and visual art— an oppositional aesthetic which underscores the values of such expressions as tools for resistance and empowerment. Indeed, to invoke the spectre of Kant, I am beckoned to ask: how might Black art, or a Black aesthetic experience be ‘disinterested; when the valency of a lived Black experience from past to present, remains active in its cultural, communal and political investments? Black Aesthetics, as bell hooks confers, is not purely about style or tastes, but rather they prove to be tools for survival, resistance and cultural affirmation which can stand apart from and or challenge hegemonic artistic values.
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To activate the past and to present ideations of the future is the call to action I find painting and printmaking to provoke in tandem. My primary concerns are the repository of images: shot, found, archival and imagined, digital or diasporic, from antiquity to Anthropocene, that are strange and oppositional. An Aesthetics of Blackness. For, exploring contradictions through painting and printmaking may illustrate physical and conceptual parallels between the medium and the body. It is difficult not to compare the similarity between the repulsion of oil and water to produce a lithographic print to the polarities of Ekpe masquerade’s ebullience and severin British institutional educations; polarities I contain. It is furthermore difficult not to compare:
I painted a person, yes they’re Black…and?
with
I painted cousin.
(The latter refers to a friend I grew to know and admire). And, how these modes of exchange correspond with incessant code-switching which is as physical as it is tonal or lexical. Thus arises the gestures of performance, of moods and the fungibility of language and shifting structures of powers we ceaselessly wade through.
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The marriage of painting and printmaking exists not only as a formal classification, but one which pokes at and teases itselfand the artist as they are wanting. The image is loud if we are willing to listen. Painting and printmaking are air signs. Painting is Libra and printmaking is Aquarius. But they are (if and when combined) a vehicle and a method: expanded in field and omnidirectional in time.
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Anietie Ekanem, September 2024.